Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping creative work; however, its integration is neither uniform nor inevitable. We examine video game development, a multidisciplinary domain spanning art, programming, narrative, and design, as a critical site where workers actively negotiate the AI integration. Drawing on interviews with game creatives and informed by a political economy lens, we trace the structural conditions shaping AI adoption, the strategies creatives employ to selectively incorporate AI while maintaining critical distance, and the tensions produced by capitalist imperatives that provoke their resistance to AI. We articulate design tensions and the politics of AI integration in game development and adjacent creative domains. In doing so, our study intervenes in AI design discourse by challenging narratives of technological inevitability as well as labor and value extraction, towards envisioning possibilities for creative AI grounded in human agency.

Data-driven systems, such as satellite imagery, often dictate urban planning; however, they frequently neglect local, situated, and embodied knowledges. This paper examines the epistemic, political, and socio-ecological frictions that surface when city data (e.g., aerial imagery and administrative records) is brought into dialogue with community data (e.g., lived experiences and shared epistemologies) to guide more equitable urban planning. We employ Research through Design, complemented by ethnographic inquiry and auto-ethnographic reflection, to create a speculative probe that helps foreground the frictions embedded in urban data infrastructures in Bangalore, India. Our analysis reveals the limitations of dominant top-down urban data systems, which routinely obscure socio-ecological dependencies and selectively define what constitutes legitimate urban knowledge. We employ environmental justice as an analytical lens to analyze our findings, highlighting how urban data infrastructures can reproduce or contest inequalities and identify opportunities to foreground care, accountability, and equity, particularly in postcolonial contexts, toward cultivating socially just and climate-resilient urban futures.

Menstrual experiences are shaped by many different stakeholders, entities, and the broader socio-cultural context, or in other words, the ecological systems surrounding a menstruator. We explore what it means to take an ecological approach in studying and designing menstrual technologies. We translated and adapted Ecological Systems Theory (EST) for menstrual wellbeing and packaged the outcome in the form of a socio-ecological Canvas, accompanied by written examples and a set of prompts to facilitate engagement. We invited ten experts to engage with the Canvas in reflective workshops, which informed its further refinement. These sessions highlighted the Canvas’ generative value, fostering critical reflection on how design choices are shaped by and ripple across layers of influence. With this translational research, we invite HCI researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the ecologies they study and design for, envisioning both aspired versions of existing realities and realities that do not exist yet.

Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research on maternal and child health (MCH) has largely taken mother- or child-centric lenses to technology design for improved outcomes. An emerging body of CSCW research has called for a renewed focus on supporting caregivers through sociotechnical interventions to enable better health outcomes. Our research--with underserved communities in urban India--extends this prior work by centering fathers and their care work during pregnancy and early childhood. We examine how gender roles, religious beliefs, aspirations for social mobility, and financial responsibilities influence fathers' participation in MCH. We use qualitative inquiry in highlighting the constraints on the nature of care work fathers are able to perform given the patriarchal and societal norms they operate within, and how the care work they perform is rendered invisible by diverging from traditional notions of care. In doing so, we expand dominant notions of care work in such ecologies, and discuss implications for the design of technologies for better supporting fathers towards familial wellbeing.

The impact of culture on how people express distress in online support communities is increasingly a topic of interest within Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In the United States, distinct cultures have emerged from each of the two dominant political parties, forming a primary lens by which people navigate online and offline worlds. We examine whether partisan culture may play a role in how U.S. Republican and Democrat users of online mental health support communities express distress. We present a large-scale observational study of 2,184,356 posts from 8,916 statistically matched Republican, Democrat, and unaffiliated online support community members. We utilize methods from causal inference to statistically match partisan users along covariates that correspond with demographic attributes and platform use, in order to create comparable cohorts for analysis. We then leverage methods from natural language processing to understand how partisan expressions of distress compare between these sets of closely matched opposing partisans, and between closely matched partisans and typical support community members. Our data spans January 2013 to December 2022, a period of both rising political polarization and mental health concerns. We find that partisan culture does play into expressions of distress, underscoring the importance of considering partisan cultural differences in the design of online support community platforms.

People experiencing severe distress increasingly use Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots as mental health support tools. Discussions on social media have described how engagements were lifesaving for some, but evidence suggests that general-purpose LLM chatbots also have notable risks that could endanger the welfare of users if not designed responsibly. In this study, we investigate the lived experiences of people who have used LLM chatbots for mental health support. We build on interviews with 21 individuals from globally diverse backgrounds to analyze how users create unique support roles for their chatbots, fill in gaps in everyday care, and navigate associated cultural limitations when seeking support from chatbots. We ground our analysis in psychotherapy literature around effective support, and introduce the concept of therapeutic alignment, or aligning AI with therapeutic values for mental health contexts. Our study offers recommendations for how designers can approach the ethical and effective use of LLM chatbots and other AI mental health support tools in mental health care.

Postcolonial and decolonial computing examines how technology design and adoption can perpetuate subtle dimensions of coloniality, under-represent certain regions (e.g., the Global South, non-Western regions, Indigenous societies), and marginalize them. There has been a growing interest in interdisciplinary research focusing on marginalized communities, including accessibility and participatory research. Despite the rapid expansion of accessibility research in the last decades, little focus is placed on accessibility issues within marginalized societies, hindering them from effectively benefiting from accessibility research discussions and outcomes. The accessibility and HCI communities still lack comprehensive knowledge on conducting interdisciplinary research that includes diverse cultures and experiences from some of the systematically marginalized regions. This workshop will explore the intersection of accessibility, HCI, and cross-regional studies, bringing together researchers and practitioners to foster collaborations, identify under-explored research areas, and develop guidelines to support inclusive research practices.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has shown significant promise in alleviating treatment-resistant mental illness, prompting excitement among people with lived experience of mental illness. The emerging collective perception of psychedelics as tools for mental health has been dubbed the Pollan Effect. We investigate whether the Pollan Effect carries to online community discussions concerning psilocybin-containing mushrooms (PCMs). Through a matched computational analysis of 676,875 longform Reddit posts describing PCM use spanning a decade, we provide evidence of the Pollan Effect in terms of increased health discourse around PCMs following two inception points—release of a book and subsequent documentary on PCMs. We then introduce the notion of a Pollan shift, which we witness through increased collective sharing of emotional and social experiences following the two inception points. Our findings offer insights into how online discourse could be representative of emerging social movements around new psychiatric treatments, and the role of platforms in sensemaking and research.

Participatory approaches may empower community members toward their development; however, structural and identity-based factors may impede participation. It becomes imperative to critically examine the politics, dynamics, and rhetoric of participation in development contexts. We deconstruct the meaning, means, and need for participation by situating our study in the Indian government's growing efforts to digitalize a nationwide scheme implemented to support rural farmers' participation in natural resource management (NRM) to achieve secure employment and build climate change resilience. Capturing the situated essence through field studies that include observations, interviews, and focus groups, we systematically analyze challenges to participation in NRM and uncover the technological gaps affecting its workflow digitalization. We discuss sociotechnical considerations to meaningfully design and integrate digital technologies toward supporting equitable participation in achieving sustainable development.

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have increasingly been questioning computing’s engagement with unsustainable and unjust economic growth, pushing for identifying alternatives. Incorporating degrowth, post-development, and steady-state approaches, post-growth philosophy offers an alternative not rooted in growth but in improving quality of life. It recommends an equitable reduction in resource use through sensible distributive practices where fulfillment is based on values including solidarity, cooperation, care, social justice, and localized development. In this paper, we describe opportunities for HCI to take a post-growth orientation in research, design, and practice to reimagine the design of sociotechnical systems toward advancing sustainable, just, and humane futures. We aim for the critiques, concerns, and recommendations offered by post-growth to be integrated into transformative HCI practices for technology-mediated change.

The growing platformization of health has spurred new avenues for healthcare access and reinvigorated telemedicine as a viable pathway to care. Telemedicine adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced barriers to patient-centered care that call for attention. Our work extends current Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on telemedicine and the challenges to remote care, and investigates the scope for enhancing remote care seeking and provision through telemedicine workflows involving intermediation. Our study, focused on the urban Indian context, involved providing doctors with videos of remote clinical examinations to aid in telemedicine. We present a qualitative evaluation of this modified telemedicine experience, highlighting how workflows involving intermediation could bridge existing gaps in telemedicine, and how their acceptance among doctors could shift interaction dynamics between doctors and patients. We conclude by discussing the implications of such telemedicine workflows on patient-centered care and the future of care work.

Digitalization has motivated romance novelists to move from traditional to self-publishing online. However, engagement with flexible and responsive, yet precarious and biased algorithmic systems online pose challenges for novelists. Through surveying and interviewing the novelists, and using the lens of feminist political economy, we investigate how digitalization has impacted the novelists’ work practices. Our findings detail the increased agency afforded by self-publishing online, which comes at the expense of performing new forms of work individually, collectively, and with assistance, otherwise performed by publishing houses. We focus on the immaterial, invisible, and unpaid work that the novelists and the ecology of workers surrounding them conducted. We make recommendations for designing digital labor platforms that support the work practices of self-employed digital workers toward a more sustainable, collective, and inclusive future(s) of work.

Social and cultural taboos frequently prevent meaningful conversation around gendered health and wellbeing, across the globe and to varying degrees. Safe spaces can offer potential avenues to nurture non-judgmental environments for dialogue and opportunities for learning to talk through taboos. To this end, we curated an online safe space on WhatsApp—with 35 participants of Indian origin—to facilitate conversations around diverse topics related to gendered health and wellbeing. We observed participant activity for two weeks, before conducting in-depth interviews with 10 participants to better understand their experiences of engaging within the WhatsApp group. We use the lens of Legitimate Peripheral Participation to examine how peripheral and core members of the community drew on new audiences and support systems as they questioned existing structures upholding taboos. We discuss scaffolding mechanisms that could enhance learning about taboo topics in online safe spaces, and the tensions of anonymity in such learning spaces.

There has been a growing interest in reproductive health and intimate wellbeing in Human-Computer Interaction, increasingly from an ecological perspective. Much of this work is centered around women’s experiences across diverse settings, emphasizing men’s limited engagement and need for greater participation on these topics. Our research responds to this gap by investigating cisgender men’s experiences of cultivating sexual health literacies in an urban Indian context. We leverage media probes to stimulate focus group discussions, using popular media references on men’s fertility to elicit shared reflection. Our findings uncover the role that humor and masculinity play in shaping men’s perceptions of their sexual health and how this influences their sense of agency and participation in heterosexual intimate relationships. We further discuss how technologies might be designed to support men’s participation in these relationships as supportive partners and allies.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) research is increasingly investigating the roles of caregivers as ancillary stakeholders in patient-centered care. Our research extends this body of work to identify caregivers as key decision-makers and boundary actors in mobilizing and managing care. We draw on qualitative data collected via 20 semi-structured interviews to examine caregiving responsibilities in physical and remote care interactions within households in urban India. Our findings demonstrate the crucial intermediating roles family caregivers take on while situated along the boundaries separating healthcare professionals, patients and other household members, and online/offline communities. We propose design recommendations for supporting caregivers in intermediating patient-centered care, such as through training content and expert feedback mechanisms for remote care, collaborative tracking mechanisms integrating patient- and caregiver-generated health data, and caregiving-centered online health communities. We conclude by arguing for recognizing caregivers as critical stakeholders in patient-centered care who might constitute technologically assisted pathways to care.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technologies are increasingly being integrated into public sector programs to help with decision-support and effective distribution of constrained resources. The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has begun to examine how the resultant sociotechnical systems may be designed appropriately when targeting underserved populations. We present an ethnographic study of a large-scale real-world integration of an AI system for resource allocation in a call-based maternal and child health program in India. Our findings uncover complexities around determining who benefits from the intervention, how the human-AI collaboration is managed, when intervention must take place in alignment with various priorities, and why the AI is sought, for what purpose. Our paper offers takeaways for human-centered AI integration in public health, drawing attention to the work done by the AI as actor, the work of configuring the human-AI partnership with multiple diverse stakeholders, and the work of aligning program goals for design and implementation through continual dialogue across stakeholders.

People experiencing mental illness are often forced into a system in which their chances of finding relief are largely determined by institutions that evaluate whether their distress deserves treatment. These governing institutions can be offline, such as the American healthcare system, and can also be online, such as online social platforms. As work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) frames technology-mediated support as one method to fill structural gaps in care, in this study, we ask the question: how do online and offline institutions influence how people in resource-scarce areas understand and express their distress online? We situate our work in U.S. Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas (MHPSAs), or areas in which there are too few mental health professionals to meet expected needs. We use an analysis of illness narratives to answer this question, conducting a large scale linguistic analysis of social media posts to understand broader trends in expressions of distress online. We then build on these analyses via in-depth interviews with 18 participants with lived experience of mental illness, analyzing the role of online and offline institutions in how participants express distress online. Through our findings, we argue that a consideration of institutions is crucial in designing effective technology-mediated support, and discuss the implications of considering institutions in mental health support for platform designers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. Prior work on COVID-19 visualizations has primarily focused on the design and evaluation of specific visualization systems from technology-centered perspectives. However, little is known about what occurs behind the scenes during the visualization creation processes, given the complex sociotechnical contexts in which they are embedded. Yet, such ecological knowledge is necessary to help characterize the nuances and trajectories of visualization design practices in the wild, as well as generate insights into how creators come to understand and approach visualization design on their own terms and for their own situated purposes. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how did visualization creators engage in COVID-19 dashboard design, and what tensions, conflicts, and challenges arose during this process? Our findings detail the trajectory of design practices-from creation to expansion, maintenance, and termination-that are shaped by the complex interplay between design goals, tools and technologies, labor, emerging crisis contexts, and public engagement. We particularly examined the tensions between designers and the general public involved in these processes. These conflicts, which often materialized due to a divergence between public demands and standing policies, centered around the type and amount of information to be visualized, how public perceptions shape and are shaped by visualization design, and the strategies utilized to deal with (potential) misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations. Our findings and lessons learned shed light on new ways of thinking in visualization design, focusing on the bundled activities that are invariably involved in human and nonhuman participation throughout the entire trajectory of design practice.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on menstrual tracking has emphasized the need for more inclusive design of mechanisms for tracking and sharing information on menstruation. We investigate menstrual tracking and data-sharing attitudes and practices in educated, young (20-30 years old) menstruating individuals based in the United States, with self-identified minimal menstrual education backgrounds. Using interviews (N=18), a survey (N=62), and participatory design (N=7), we find that existing mechanisms for tracking and sharing data on menstruation are not adequately responsive to the needs of those who seek relevant menstrual education, are not in the sexual majority, and/or wish to customize what menstrual data they share and with whom. Our analysis highlights a design gap for participants with minimal sexual education backgrounds who wish to better understand their cycles. We also contribute a deepened understanding of structural health inequities that impact menstrual tracking and sharing practices, making recommendations for technology-mediated menstrual care.

The field of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classification, is conscious of structural factors that influence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power differentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness.

Data-driven approaches that form the foundation of advancements in machine learning (ML) are powered in large part by human infrastructures that enable the collection of large datasets. We study the movement of data through multiple stages of data processing in the context of public health in India, examining the data work performed by frontline health workers, data stewards, and ML developers. We conducted interviews with these stakeholders to understand their varied perspectives on valuing data across stages, working with data to attain this value, and challenges arising throughout. We discuss the tensions in valuing and how they might be addressed, as we emphasize the need for improved transparency and accountability when data are transformed from one stage of processing to the next.

Menstrual tracking is a mechanism widely engaged towards preserving menstrual dignity, as natural birth control, for ensuring adequate preparation for an upcoming cycle, among other motivations. We investigate the design of digital menstrual trackers towards enabling period-positive ecologies in otherwise stigmatized contexts. We examine menstrual tracking practices across ages (12–65 yrs.) using a combination of methods—3 surveys (450+ responses), a cultural probe (10 adolescents), interviews (16 adults), and a review of (9) mobile applications. Our analysis highlights the diversity across menstrual tracking practices and the role of relationships in influencing these practices throughout the menstrual journey. We also identify menstrual tracking as an avenue towards the emancipation of those who menstruate. Finally, we draw on Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities to discuss sociotechnical implications for redesigning digital menstrual trackers towards crafting just and period-positive futures.

Safe menstrual hygiene practices are central to maintaining good menstrual health. In addition to menstrual literacy, practicing safe menstrual hygiene requires access to menstrual products and a private, safe, and hygienic space for changing and cleaning. Access to such infrastructure, specifically functional public toilets, becomes even more crucial for menstruators when navigating public spaces while having periods. This work presents the learnings from the prototyping of MenstruSPACE, a toilet locator application offering an annotation system for public toilets towards supporting menstrual mobilities. Our design journey revealed a set of design tensions and open challenges to be considered when designing public infrastructure annotation systems to facilitate safe menstrual mobilities.

Care workers are increasingly using digital technology in their daily lives, for monitoring, financial compensation, training, coordination, and more. State and corporate actors have invested significant resources to enable this digital shift, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, care work has remained chronically underpaid, and continues to rely on women from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds. Our paper examines how care workers carefully navigate digitization, precarity, and complex social relationships, in an attempt to care for their communities and each other. We analyze the emerging digital ecosystem for frontline health workers in India during the COVID-19 pandemic where these dynamics have been highly visible. Our research draws attention to four interconnected ways in which workers practiced care, by directing their efforts towards survival, resilience, advocacy, and/or resistance. We suggest these also as care orientations that can be adopted by researchers and practitioners, to critically reflect on and direct technology design towards enabling more caring futures, for (and with) workers and communities.

Many romance novelists have shifted to self-publishing mediated through online technologies, such as online retailer platforms for selling novels and social media for marketing. However, engagement with such complex algorithmic systems has posed challenges, including understanding continually changing algorithms, frequently changing silently, impacting novelists' successful professionalization and monetization. We conducted surveys and interviews with romance novelists to examine how they experience, interpret, and navigate algorithms. Our findings detail interviewees' efforts to comprehend algorithms, both individually and collectively, and leverage that comprehension to navigate and manipulate algorithms. We discuss how our interviewees constructed literacy of precarious algorithms on their work platforms, suggesting implications for designing algorithmic systems supporting digital work.

There has been growing interest in the application of AI for Social Good, motivated by scarce and unequal resources globally. We focus on the case of AI in frontline health, a Social Good domain that is increasingly a topic of significant attention. We offer a thematic discourse analysis of scientific and grey literature to identify prominent applications of AI in frontline health, motivations driving this work, stakeholders involved, and levels of engagement with the local context. We then uncover design considerations for these systems, drawing from data from three years of ethnographic fieldwork with women frontline health workers and women from marginalized communities in Delhi (India). Finally, we outline an agenda for AI systems that target Social Good, drawing from literature on HCI4D, post-development critique, and transnational feminist theory. Our paper thus offers a critical and ethnographic perspective to inform the design of AI systems that target social impact.

Individuals in distress adopt varied pathways in pursuit of care that aligns with their individual needs. Prior work has established that the first resource an individual leverages can influence later care and recovery, but less is understood about how the design of a point of care might interact with subsequent pathways to care. We investigate how the design of the Indian mental health helpline system interacts with complex sociocultural factors to marginalize caller needs. We draw on interviews with 18 helpline stakeholders, including individuals who have engaged with helplines in the past, shedding light on how they navigate both technological and structural barriers in pursuit of relief. Finally, we use a design justice framework rooted in Amartya Sen’s conceptualization of realization-focused justice to discuss implications and present recommendations towards the design of technology-mediated points of mental health support.

Telehealth technologies have long remained on the peripheries of healthcare systems that prioritize in-person healthcare provision. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the need to formalize telehealth infrastructures, particularly teleconsultations, to ensure continued care provision through remote mechanisms. In the Indian healthcare context, prior to the pandemic, teleconsultations have been used to substitute for in-person consultations when possible, and to facilitate remote follow-up care without exacerbating pressures on limited personal resources. We conducted a survey and interview study to investigate doctors' and patients' perceptions, experiences, and expectations around teleconsultations, and how these contribute towards supplementing healthcare infrastructures in India, focusing on the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe the efforts of our participants towards infrastructuring telehealth, examining how technologies were adapted to support teleconsultation, how expectations shifted, and how the dynamics of caregiving evolved through this transition. We present implications for the future design and uptake of telehealth, arguing that COVID-19's impact on teleconsultations lays the foundation for new telehealth infrastructures for more inclusive and equitable care.

Older adults are especially vulnerable to online cybersecurity and privacy (SP) threats, such as phishing, ransomware, and targeted misinformation campaigns. Prior work has suggested that this vulnerability may be addressed with the design of social SP interfaces, such that groups of individuals might work together on behalf of one another to manage SP threats collectively. To this end, we present findings from a qualitative inquiry conducted with older adults and members of technology-rich middle-income households in urban India, where technology users have been shown to engage in relatively more social SP practices. Our research examines the collaborative behaviors enacted by different members of the household for protection from SP threats. In particular, we show how self-appointed family technology managers straddle the line between stewardship and paternalism in their efforts to protect older adults from perceived digital threats. We also offer design implications for supporting collaborative cybersecurity within households based on the insights derived from our analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the transition of workflows across sectors to digital platforms. In education settings, stakeholders previously reluctant to integrate computing technology in the classroom now find themselves with little choice but to embrace it. This move to the digital brings additional challenges in underserved contexts with limited, intermittent, and shared access to mobile or computing devices and the internet. In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, we investigate how educational institutions (schools and non-profit organizations) working with underserved populations in India are managing the transition to online or remote learning. We conducted twenty remote interviews with students, teachers, and administrators from underserved contexts across India. We found that online learning efforts in this setting relied on a resilient human infrastructure comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, and non-profit organizations to help navigate and overcome the limitations of available technical infrastructure. Our research aims to articulate lessons for educational technology design in the post-COVID period, outlining areas for improvement in the design of online learning platforms in resource-constrained settings, and identifying elements of online learning that could be retained to strengthen the education system overall.

We are witnessing unprecedented datafication of the society we live in, alongside rapid advances in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. However, emergent data-driven applications are systematically discriminating against many diverse populations. A major driver of the bias are the data, which typically align with predominantly Western definitions and lack representation from multilingually diverse and resource-constrained regions across the world. Therefore, data-driven approaches can benefit from integration of a more human-centred orientation before being used to inform the design, deployment, and evaluation of technologies in various contexts. This workshop seeks to advance these and similar conversations, by inviting researchers and practitioners in interdisciplinary domains to engage in conversation around how appropriate human-centred design can contribute to addressing data-related challenges among marginalised and under-represented/underserved groups.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) disproportionately affects United States veterans, yet they may be reluctant to seek or engage in care. We interview 21 participants, including veterans with PTSD, clinicians who treat veterans and friends and family that support veterans through mental health ordeals. We investigate the military identity these veterans share. We explore how this may add to their reluctance in care-seeking behaviors. We also explore the roles of human and non-human intermediaries in ecologies of care and the potential for enhancing patient empowerment in current clinical treatment contexts. We discuss how military culture can be utilized in clinical care, how multiple perspectives can be leveraged to create a more holistic view of the patient, and finally, how veterans can be empowered during treatment. We conclude with recommendations for the design of sociotechnical systems that prioritize the above in support of the mental well-being of veterans with PTSD.

Significant research in HCI and beyond has sought to understand end-user needs in formal and informal technology-mediated mental health support (TMMHS) systems. However, little work has been done to understand the experiences and needs of the individuals who power or support these systems, particularly in the Global South. We present a qualitative study of one of the most accessible forms of mental health care in India — helplines. Through in-depth interviews conducted with 12 helpline volunteers, we research the human infrastructure responsible for the functioning of helplines. We foreground the often invisible labor involved in erecting and maintaining the institutional, interpersonal, and individual boundaries that are critical to realizing the goals of these helplines. Finally, we discuss the implications of our research for future work examining human infrastructures, particularly in mental health settings, and for the design of future TMMHS systems that deliver on-demand care to diverse, underserved, and stigmatized populations.

The future of work is speculated to undergo profound change with increased automation. Predictable jobs are projected to face high susceptibility to technological developments. Many economies in Global South are built around outsourcing and manual labour, facing a risk of job insecurity. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and practices around automated futures of work among a population that is highly vulnerable to algorithms and robots entering rule-based and manual domains: vocational technicians. We present results from participatory action research with 38 vocational technician students of low socio-economic status in Bangalore, India. Our findings show that technicians were unfamiliar with the growth of automation, but upon learning about it, articulated an emic vision for a future of work in-line with their value systems. Participants felt excluded by current technological platforms for skilling and job-seeking. We present opportunities for technology industry and policy makers to build a future of work for vulnerable communities.

In cultural contexts where menstruation is a stigmatized health topic, daily management of menstrual hygiene comes with its set of challenges. Our research aims to identify and examine such challenges faced during menstruation in the urban environs of Delhi, India. Through participatory design activities and interviews conducted with 35 participants who identified as menstruating and female, and a survey with 139 responses, we investigate how participants deal with their periods on the go. We also examine participants' conceptualizations of safe spaces, where they are able to deal with their period on their own terms. Finally, we discuss how menstrual mobilities are being, and might be, supported through technology-based interventions for a third space, targeting the legibility, literacy, and legitimacy of surrounding environments.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aims at securing a lasting impact for technology-based interventions in the context of social inequities. Increasingly, HCI scholars are proposing assets-based design as an effective approach towards this issue. Rather than starting from people's needs and deficits, this approach posits that design should start from a deep understanding of people's assets. A pending issue, however, is how to account for the situated nature of assets; that is, how to decide which asset to leverage and for what design purpose. Drawing from cultural sociology and shifting the emphasis from assets to capacities, we propose Swidler's theory of culture-in-action as an analytical lens for unpacking the complex relationship between capacities, goals, and structural limitations. Leveraging findings from a Participatory Design engagement with 35 Latino immigrant parents for envisioning parent-education technologies, we demonstrate the applicability of this lens. We contribute to HCI scholarship by further discussing 1) how to analyze capacities' design potential, and 2) the methodological particularities for collecting them.

The field of personal health informatics has received increasing attention within the CSCW and HCI communities as health tracking becomes more affordable, accessible, and pervasive. Chronic disease management, in particular, presents tremendous potential for intervention given patients' ability to now actively participate in their care through tracking. The focus on 'personal' in health informatics, however, obfuscates the role of other cultural and ecological factors that might shape health tracking behaviors, and important information from alternative sources could be ignored by virtue of being subjective, complex, or simply hard to collect. To dig deeper into these negative spaces that may go untracked, uncover potential sources of important health information, and more completely understand current tracking practices, we embarked on an interview study with patients with cardiac diseases in Bangalore, India. In this paper, we present these patients' current health management approaches that are culturally situated, identifying both motivations and barriers to tracking, their attitudes towards online information, as well as cultural and ecological influences on their perceptions of cardiac care. We then discuss the interplay between our findings and current notions of, and approaches towards, patient empowerment and datafication of health.

In this article, we present 6 cases (contained in 13 studies) variously connected with women’s health in a range of Indian contexts. Analyzing these cases, we highlight that “women’s health” is inextricably linked with extrinsic factors that also need addressing, to propose a broadened focus of “women’s wellbeing,” as defined through the lens of Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities . Drawing again on our cases, we discuss the importance of taking a long, holistic, and intersectional view to women’s wellbeing. Consolidating lessons learned across studies, we emphasize the potential of framing challenges around women’s health as learning problems, rather than problems of information access alone. Leveraging this perspective, we propose the use of design-based implementation research as a potential approach in identified learning ecologies, given its emphasis on long-term engagement with multiple stakeholders in the learning process. Although the empirical research we draw from took place in various Indian contexts, we conclude by arguing that key contextual characteristics may translate to other cultures and geographies as well.

Technology use in India is highly gendered across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and women have only recently come to widely adopt smartphones, mobile internet, and social media---even in urban India. We present an in-depth qualitative investigation of the appropriation of social computing technologies by women from urban, middle-income households in New Delhi and Bangalore, India. Our findings highlight the additional burden that these women must contend with, on account of gender, as they engage on social media. We discuss these findings to make three contributions. First, we extend conversations on gender in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by discussing how design in patriarchal contexts might be rooted in existing efforts towards change and appropriation. Second, we expand understandings of privacy in HCI as being situated in the relationship between the individual and the collective. Third, we discuss how looking at our participants' social media use across multiple platforms leads to greater insight into the link between social media engagement and privacy.

Research in Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) routinely relies on and engages with the increasing penetration of smartphones and the internet. We examine the mobile, internet, and social media practices of women community health workers, for whom internet access has newly become possible. These workers are uniquely positioned at the intersections of various communities of practice---their familial units, workplaces, networks of health workers, larger communities, and the online world. However, they remain at the margins of each, on account of difference in gender, class, literacies, professional expertise, and more. Our findings unpack the legitimate peripheral participation of these workers; examining how they appropriate smartphones and the internet to move away from the peripheries to fully participate in these communities. We discuss how their activities are motivated by moves towards empowerment, digitization, and improved healthcare provision. We consider how future work might support, leverage, and extend their efforts.

Emojis are becoming an increasingly popular mode of communication between individuals worldwide, with researchers claiming them to be a type of "ubiquitous language'' that can span different languages due to its pictorial nature. Our study uses a combination of methods to examine how emojis are adopted and perceived by individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and 45 countries. Our survey and interview findings point to the existence of a cultural gap between user perceptions and the current emoji standard. Using participatory design, we sought to address this gap by designing 40 emojis and conducted another survey to evaluate their acceptability compared to existing Japanese emojis. We also draw on participant observation from a Unicode Consortium meeting on emoji addition. Our analysis leads us to discuss how emojis might be made more inclusive, diverse, and representative of the populations that use them.

We examined the integration of VR into informal and less-structured learning environments in Atlanta (USA) and Mumbai (India) through a process of co-design, co-creation, and co-learning with students and teachers where students learned to use VR to engage with their economic, social, and cultural realities. Using qualitative methods, we engaged students and teachers at both sites in VR content creation activities; through these activities, we attempt to uncover a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities of introducing low-cost mobile VR for content generation, consumption, and sharing in underserved learning contexts. We also motivate future work that looks at integrating VR in new contexts, using flexible methods, across borders. The larger vision of our research is to advance us towards greater accessibility and inclusivity of VR across diverse learning environments.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has shown a growing interest in how technology might support parenting. An area that remains underexplored is the design of technology to support parents from nondominant groups in positively impacting their children's education. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), our paper takes a sociotechnical view of low-income Latino Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S.---a large nondominant group---attempting to form alliances with other actors such as teachers, the broader community, and technology to exchange information that might enrich their children's education. The use of ANT allowed us to advance work on parenting in HCI by providing a deeper understanding of the reasons---including attributes embedded in technology---impacting the quality of information channels in the parental engagement network of a nondominant group. Further, our ANT analysis illuminates a discussion of challenges and opportunities for technology to intervene in the network in ways that align with all actors' needs and harness their potentialities.

Mental illness is rapidly gaining recognition as a serious global challenge. Recent human-computer interaction (HCI) research has investigated mental health as a domain of concern, but is yet to venture into the Global South, where the problem exhibits a more complex, intersectional nature. In this paper, we review work on mental health in the Global South and present a case for HCI for Development (HCI4D) to look at mental health-both because it is an inarguably important area of concern in itself, and also because it impacts the efficacy of HCI4D interventions in other domains. We consider the role of cultural and resource-based interactions towards accessibility challenges and continuing stigma around mental health. We also identify participants' mental health as a constant consideration for HCI4D and present best practices for measuring and incorporating it. As an example, we demonstrate how both the process and the lens of aspirations-based design, a recently proposed approach for HCI4D research and design, may benefit from the consideration of mental health concerns. Our paper thus recommends a path forward for considering mental health in HCI4D, potentially leading to new research directions in addition to enriching existing ones.

We present an initial qualitative exploration of Twitter data on autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) from India and the United States, conducted with the goal of learning more about the nature of existing online awareness around ASDs in India. We collected tweets from both locations during and around World Autism Awareness Day and World AIDS Day. We then qualitatively analyzed these tweets, finding differences in how each country talks about stigmatized health issues and how Indian users talk about ASDs. We use these findings to discuss potential avenues for research on supporting and extending existing levels of autism awareness in India.

Early detection of developmental and growth deviations enables early intervention so that children and parents suffer minimal irreversible physical and financial damage. In India however, pediatricians operate within acute time constraints that keep them from performing comprehensive developmental assessments for their patients. Parents' lack of awareness regarding growth and development milestones further hinders early detection. Our paper contributes the design and evaluation of a probe that seeks to understand the needs of variously resource-constrained middle-class parents in India for monitoring their children's growth, development, and immunization milestones. Our findings highlight the potential of mobile information-based applications to engage, assist, and empower Indian parents. In addition, we describe the affordances of a design process that originated amidst a richly resourced hackerspace organized to address the needs of under-resourced settings, and discuss the consequences of this process on our design.

We present a case for aspirations-based design by drawing on a qualitative inquiry into the lives of young girls in rural West Bengal (India). These girls form a particularly vulnerable population, coming from an area known to be susceptible to sex trafficking and crimes against women. We leverage our findings to engage with Kentaro Toyama's call for greater attention to aspirations in designing technology for development [51]. We highlight the aspirations of and for these girls and reflect on the embedded, temporal, and mutable qualities of these aspirations. Finally, we examine how an aspirations-based design approach might factor these qualities into technology design. Although our analysis draws on empirical findings from rural/suburban India, the insights derived from this research are relevant for the process of designing technologies towards fulfillment of aspirations, more generally.

Parents' participation and actual engagement in their children's education is one of the most important predictors of children's academic success. However, inequities in information access prevent many parents in the United States from engaging in ways that allow their children to achieve such success. We present preliminary research that holistically captures everyday technology and information practices of low-income Latino immigrants in Atlanta, Georgia. Our findings identify assets mobilized by these parents to design Consejero Automatico, a chatbot for WhatsApp that helps parents improve their information-seeking practices. We use Consejero as a probe for uncovering design goals and constraints when leveraging everday assets, and present a preliminary results that emphasize the role of trust in driving the adoption of tools for enhancing information sharing amongst the targeted group.

In Cuba, where internet access is severely constrained, technology enthusiasts have built StreetNet (SNET), a community network (CN) that has grown organically, reaching tens of thousands of households across Havana. Through fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, we investigate participants' strategies as they engage with a network where the material elements---cables, switches, nanos, and servers---are regularly breaking down. Drawing on maintenance and care (M&C) scholarship, we present an in-depth investigation of the management and anticipation of breakdowns in SNET, foregrounding the deeply relational nature of repair work, collective efforts required for SNET's M&C, and the values and motivations underpinning these practices. Our paper contributes a unique perspective on how CNs are run locally and organically, outlining considerations for how interventions along these lines might be more suitably designed. We also complicate perspectives of innovation through a discussion of cultural ideologies and tensions underpinning M&C practices.

Technological advances, combined with sustained, minimalist consumerism, have raised the popularity of sharing economy platforms like Airbnb and Uber. These platforms are considered to have disrupted traditional industries and revolutionized how consumers interact with their services. The Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community has researched various aspects of the sharing economy; however, it is unclear how novices grow into experts in its various instantiations. In this paper, we present a qualitative investigation of Airbnb hosts, and Facebook groups in which they participate, for an enriched understanding of their learning mechanisms. Drawing on the theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), our findings highlight the learning mechanisms that enable novice hosts to transition from partaking in peripheral roles to becoming integrated members of their (Facebook) communities of practice. We also present recommendations for sharing economy platforms, micro-entrepreneurs, and the online communities that serve them both.

There has been a growing commitment across the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) towards investigating the design and deployment of technologies in the context of complex healthcare ecologies. We present a qualitative inquiry of one such context, as we examine the outreach practices and everyday challenges of workers at a community-based organization in Gujarat (India) that works with People Living with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus(PLHIV). Drawing on Yosso's framework of community cultural wealth-apt for such intersectional settings-and the lens of articulation work, we describe how the workers at Vikas build and strengthen varied forms of capital to restore "old normals," or what life was like for their PLHIV clients prior to diagnoses. Finally, we propose that attention to this nature of restoration work, and the workers' engagement with diverse forms of community cultural wealth, allows us to reflect on how technologies might (or might not) be designed to impact social and affective aspects of health.

Research in the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly embracing and moving across borders. While universalism in such research is widely rejected, sole focus on the "particular'' is also commonly critiqued. Kentaro Toyama unpacks this tension, calling for balance via "deliberate efforts to understand the interplay of human universals and cultural differences, and how it pertains to design.'' In this paper, one such deliberate effort, we introduce the notion of feminist solidarity---as theorized by Chandra Mohanty---for drawing connections across borders in CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. To enable contributions in these fields to cross cultures and geographies in productive ways, we draw attention to commonalities in the struggles and processes of resistance operating in different contexts of study. To do this, we present lessons learned from conducting three comparative studies in six contexts, which were located across various borders. The primary contribution of our analysis is to leverage a feminist solidarity-based approach towards extending conversations on comparative, transnational, and feminist CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. Our focus remains on resource-constrained regions across the world, in both the Global North and South.

In this paper, we examine the information work that bilingual parent-education liaisons perform to create connections towards assisting immigrant parents in the United States. As part of formal and informal educational institutions, liaisons operate between different social worlds---within and beyond the domain of education---to maximize immigrant parents' engagement in their children's academic lives. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with low-income Latino immigrants and their liaisons, we explore how liaisons leverage technology, content, and people to align these worlds; bringing them closer to mutual understanding. We borrow inspiration from the analytical lens of seams suggested by Vertesi to explore how liaisons manage the "seams'' between worlds. This analysis provides a rich and unique perspective of the work that successfully engages immigrant parents with their children's education, as well as the tensions that challenge that engagement. This understanding of the work that liaisons do with and across seams provides insights to inform design directions for technology that could facilitate and amplify their efforts. Finally, we highlight how exploring the seams that liaisons work with can inform the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) on the role of technology in mediation.

Cultural taboos and limiting social norms make it challenging to communicate and teach about menstrual health in India. We present findings from an inquiry of current approaches used to educate adolescents about menstruation, examining the perspectives of young adults, parents, teachers, social workers, and health professionals for identifying design opportunities and potential for impact. Our findings from the content analysis of education and training materials in use, an online survey of 391 adults, 52 interviews, and 2 focus groups indicate that although detailed and descriptive information materials are available for use, there exists a disconnect between parents’ and teachers’ expectations regarding who will introduce these topics to adolescents. We also highlight a clear difference in attitudes regarding who must be taught, how, where, and at what stages. Finally, we articulate factors that shape access and receptivity to this knowledge and engage with the lens of feminist HCI to discuss sociotechnical implications for the design of menstrual health education initiatives.

In response to the recent call for a more intersectionally-aware field of human-computer interaction (HCI), we aim to operationalize intersectionality for technology design in HCI. We develop our lens of intersectionality by drawing on the work of Rita Kaur Dhamoon, and use it to analyze data collected from a multi-sited ethnographic study of seven low-resource learning environments in the Indian states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Our research contributions are threefold. First, we extend conversations in Intersectional HCI by expanding its scope from understanding users to recognizing social processes. Second, we emphasize the importance of factoring in both penalties and privileges when conducting research in underserved contexts. Finally, we engage situated comparisons as a methodology to identify pathways for designing interactive systems across intersectionally diverse environments.

Telemedicine can potentially transform healthcare delivery in low-resource environments by enabling extension of medical knowledge to remote locations, thus enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the larger healthcare infrastructure. However, empirical studies have shown mixed results at best. We present a qualitative investigation of a long-standing telemedicine program operating from Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh, India). Invoking the lenses of human infrastructure and seamful spaces, we highlight the factors that determine the success of this telemedicine program. We identify and describe three important aspects: (1) conceptualizing telemedicine as the connectedness of two nodes rather than doctors and patients alone, (2) identifying the critical 'carrying agent' (local doctors at peripheral nodes) and engaging them in program design and implementation, and (3) ensuring co-creation by engaging patients in the process. Finally, we discuss how our lenses allowed us to recognize the seams made visible through the juxtaposition of the infrastructures at the central and peripheral nodes, and to emphasize the human elements that addressed these seams for ensuring the facilitation of a successful telemedicine program.

We contribute a case study of El Paquete Semanal or "The Weekly Package" -- the pervasive, offline internet in Cuba. We conducted a qualitative inquiry of El Paquete through extensive fieldwork---interviews and observations---in Havana, Cuba. Our findings highlight the human infrastructure that supports this offline internet, rendered visible through the lens of articulation work. By offering an in-depth perspective into these workings of El Paquete, we aim to challenge established notions of what an (or the) internet "should" look like in more and less "developed" contexts. We highlight how El Paquete is a non-standardized and non-neutral internet, but still human-centered. We also offer an enriched understanding of how an entirely offline internet can provide expansive information access to support leisure and livelihood, additionally serving as a locally relevant platform that affords local participation.

We contribute to the intersection of multilingualism and human-computer interaction (HCI) with our investigation of language preferences in the context of the interface design of interactive systems. Through interview data collected from avid smartphone users located across distinct user groups in India, none of whom were native English speakers, we examine the factors that shape language choice and use on their mobile devices. Our findings indicate that these users frequently engage in English communication proactively and enthusiastically, despite their lack of English fluency, and we detail their motivations for doing so. We then discuss how language in technology use can be a way of putting forth mobility as an aspect of one's identity, making the case for an intersectional approach to studying language in HCI.

In resource-constrained economies, lack of financial participation prohibits women's economic empowerment and opportunities to improve circumstances. With the advent of Digital Financial Services (DFS), a growing emphasis has been placed on the possible positive impact of DFS on lives of individuals. However, for people to understand, adopt, and use DFS, they require certain prerequisites and enablers. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach to analyze the gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of DFS as well as the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews to evaluate the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility--all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS. We discuss the sociocultural and religious context in Pakistan that underpins some of these gendered barriers and the perceived views of both men and women.

Researchers and practitioners engaged in global health are increasingly turning to data-driven approaches. However, the institutionalized roles and responsibilities---as well as motivations and workflows---of those involved in data collection are not well understood. To attain a deeper understanding of the practices of frontline health workers engaged in data collection, we conducted fieldwork in underserved contexts of Delhi, India. In particular, we interviewed these workers and observed their interactions with 200 households. Our analysis takes a postcolonial feminist perspective to examine how these frontline health workers navigate the multiple demands placed on them by their families, society, local residents, and health organizations. We also discuss how they practice feminist solidarity, and distill lessons for improved data collection across global health initiatives.

We conducted a field study of Mohalla Clinics in Delhi (India), drawing on Haraway's work to highlight the importance of considering disparate, partial perspectives in the ecologies of such clinics. We emphasized that inadequate attention given to patients' and health workers' perspectives, and the low preparedness of the doctors at the clinics, resulted in the clinics being unable to address the needs of target patient groups. We concluded by contributing to ongoing, important conversations in the fields of ICTD, CSCW, and HCI towards redesigning healthcare interventions, revisiting patient empowerment, and redefining the role of ASHAs as infomediaries.

Our paper provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between research and practice through the study of practitioners variously engaged in field research on technology interventions in the context of global development. By conducting a qualitative inquiry with 33 practitioners from 26 global development organizations, we highlight how these practitioners have different goals, work practices, incentive structures, and expectations than researchers, making it challenging to co-create and coordinate productive and effective partnerships. Despite these challenges, practitioners in global development do appear to value and engage with research as they strive for positive impact across their target communities. Our analysis suggests that the domain of human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) might benefit from engaging in "informed practice" through alignment with design-based implementation research (DBIR), which unites researchers and practitioners in their shared commitment to both research and practice, even if research and practice respectively remain their primary commitments. Our work provides CSCW and HCI4D researchers with new ways to conceptualize and navigate the above research-practice divide. We also emphasize the contribution such an approach might make to CSCW researchers beyond the context of global development, and more broadly concerned with making a positive societal impact with their work.

Ridesharing services have been viewed as heralding the next generation of mobility and recognized for their potential to provide an alternate and more flexible model of work. These services have also been critiqued for their treatment of employees, low wages, and other concerns. In this paper, we present a qualitative investigation of the introduction of Uber in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using interview data from drivers and riders, and content analysis of riders' Facebook posts, we highlight how Uber's introduction into Dhaka's existing transportation infrastructure influenced experiences and practices of mobility in the city. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's theory of justice, we demonstrate how the introduction of Uber in Dhaka reinforces existing modes of oppression and introduces new ones, even as it generates room for creative modes of resistance. Finally, we underline algorithms' opacity and veneer of objectivity as a potential source of oppression, call for deepening the postcolonial computing perspective, and make a case for stronger connections between technology interventions and policy.

Menstruation has long remained a conversational taboo across India, resulting in inadequate dissemination of menstrual health education (MHE). Menstrupedia, a digital platform designed for an Indian audience, aims to bridge this information gap to impart MHE via its website and comic. We contribute a study of Menstrupedia---the information exchange on its website, the education it aims to provide, and the perceptions of its users. Using a combination of qualitative research methods, and engaging a feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens, we critically analyze Menstrupedia's affordances and shortcomings. We also make recommendations for the design of technology-based dissemination of MHE, as well as additional sensitive and taboo topics.

We present a mixed-methods study that compares and contrasts two distinct localization approaches for imparting video-based health education to rural Indian populations. Prior research efforts in the Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) community have emphasized the value of localization of educational content. Our research uses a combination of focus groups, interviews, and knowledge retention tests to deconstruct what localization means and how it might be incorporated. Our findings highlight how characteristics of localized videos shape the participants' viewing experiences. For development-focused organizations that leverage video-based learning, our study provides insights regarding the costs and benefits of distinct localization approaches, and offers design recommendations for producing videos that yield greater traction and higher information absorption.

We describe our experiences co-designing low-cost Virtual Reality-augmented learning experiences with and for an after-school learning center in Mumbai, India that caters to low-income children from neighboring communities. In partnership with 5 staff members and 16 students at the center, we spent 7 weeks co-designing, piloting, and iterating on VR lessons targeting 28 academic topics over a total of 15 classroom sessions. We found that VR was used to demonstrate real-world phenomena, illustrate abstract concepts, compare and contrast places in the curriculum against virtual landmarks, and motivate students. Most importantly, VR's representational fidelity appeared to arouse students' curiosity, leading them to ask more questions that reflected deeper engagement with the topic.

Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been transformed from places where people stroll and children play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigurations that have resulted from this access, as evolving internet users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also discuss the implications our findings have for the design of internet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource environments across the world, as well as the broader implications for social computing across diverse geographies.

In India, where diabetes is a growing concern and approximately 69 million are affected, we investigate the factors that influence diet management, a critical component of living with the disease. Taking the middle-income diabetes-affected household as our unit of analysis, we use a combination of semi-structured interviews and a design probe to understand if and how diets are monitored, tailored, and balanced. We research the various information-seeking behaviors of our participants and their culturally situated approaches to food and eating. Our findings illuminate how contextual nuances shape individuals' beliefs around dealing with diabetes and the ways in which family, friends, and broader social networks influence dietary decisions. We conclude by offering a framework of Learning-Being-Doing to inform the holistic design of technologies for managing diets and diabetes.

We present a qualitative inquiry through the lens of feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into women's perceptions of personal safety in New Delhi, India. Since a brutal gang-rape incident took place in Delhi in December 2012 and received global attention, women's safety has been the focus of much attention India-wide. In April 2016, the Indian government issued a mandate that all mobile phones sold in India 2017 onwards must include a panic button for women's safety. We draw on interview and survey data to examine women's responses to the mandate, also investigating what factors influence their perceptions of safety, positively and negatively. Our findings indicate that women's sense of safety may be deconstructed into a multitude of factors--personal, public, social, technological--that must align for this sense of safety to be preserved. We then discuss the implications these factors have for the success and (re-)design of the panic button and similar interventions.

Cultural taboos can restrict student learning on topics of critical importance. In India, such taboos have led multiple states to ban materials intended to educate youth about HIV, putting millions at risk. We present the design of TeachAIDS, a software application that leverages cultural insights, learning science, and affordances of technology to provide comprehensive HIV education while circumventing taboos. Using a mixed-methods evaluation, we demonstrate that this software leaves students with significantly increased knowledge about HIV and reduced stigma toward individuals infected with the virus. Validating the effectiveness of TeachAIDS in circumventing taboos, students report comfort in learning from the software, and it has since been deployed in tens of thousands of schools throughout India. The methodology presented here has broader implications for the design and implementation of interactive technologies for providing education on sensitive topics in health and other areas.

We present a qualitative study of mobile communication via WeChat in Southern China, focusing on the rapid proliferation of emoji and stickers and the lessening dependence on text. We use interview and observation data from 30 participants to investigate how rural, small town, and urban Chinese adults creatively and innovatively balance the use of emoji, stickers, and text in their mobile communication practices. We also discuss design implications of our research for the field of HCI, offering ways of leveraging the non-textual communication practices that we uncover, in scenarios where purely text-based communication may not suffice.

We present a study of internet use and its forced non-use in Bangladesh. In light of current initiatives by state and industry actors to improve internet access and bridge the 'digital divide' for under-served, under-resourced, and underrepresented communities across the world, we offer a situated, qualitative perspective on what the current state of internet use looks like for select social groups in Bangladesh. We analyze how a state-imposed ban attempted to affect the nonuse of particular web-based services and how the affected populations found or did not find workarounds in response. We also discuss takeaways for researchers as well as industry and state actors studying and working towards more equitable access to the internet in the 'developing' world.

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal instituted by the United Nations in 2015 presents a call for gender equality, targeting the elimination of "discrimination, violence, and exploitation against women". We present an analysis of recent conversations within the Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) community aiming to identify ways in which the community might approach conceptualizing, designing, and deploying ICTs to address vital concerns in this regard. We also articulate ways to frame and address key challenges moving forward through more holistic and sustainable approaches, greater engagement with diverse stakeholders, and evolved methodological toolkits.

We present results from an ethnographic inquiry of technology-based learning at an after-school learning center in Mumbai (India) that caters to students from neighboring slum communities.We conducted participant observation for 120 hours and 58 semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders (including teachers, staff, parents, and students) at the center over nine weeks from December 2015 to July 2016. Taking an assets-based approach in an underserved context, we uncover the role of care as a resource and present the rich and varied caring behaviors enacted in this sociotechnical system.We then discuss how care effects a greater sense of ownership, interdependency, and community. Examining the role of aligning values in motivating caring behavior, we conclude with recommendations for supporting, leveraging, and extending care via technology design in an underserved, technology-enhanced learning environment.

When a 7.8 intensity earthquake caused widespread disaster in Ecuador on April 16, 2016, citizens across the country self-organized to gather, mobilize, and distribute supplies to affected populations, assuming the role of ad hoc humanitarian logisticians. Drawing on ethnographic findings, we present a situated perspective of how these citizens straddled the boundaries of online and offline activity for earthquake relief. In doing so, we offer an enriched understanding of how various social media channels might support informal, on-the-ground, crisis response, but also where they fall short in the process. Studying the emergence of care where social media fell short allows us to make recommendations for technology design to improve the effectiveness of logisticians in crisis response. By examining the bodily engagement of our participants at crisis sites, their efforts to deal with material convergence, and how they interacted with social media for technology-mediated care, we also contribute an understanding of the sociomateriality of care that emerges amidst efforts towards crisis relief.

We present an empirical analysis of HCI for development (HCI4D), a growing research area aimed at understanding and designing technologies for under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented populations around the world. We first present findings from our survey of 259 HCI4D publications from the past six years and summarize how this research has evolved, with an overview of the geographies it covers, technologies it targets, and its varied epistemological and methodological underpinnings. We then discuss qualitative findings from interviews we conducted with 11 experienced HCI4D researchers, reflecting on the ground covered so far Including computing and research trends, community-building efforts, and thoughts about 'development' - as well as challenges that lie ahead and suggestions for future growth and diversification. We conclude by summarizing the contributions our paper makes to HCI researchers inside the HCI4D community as well as those outside of it, with the goal of enriching discussions on how HCI can further benefit populations around the world.

We examine the dissemination of mobile phone videos in the context of Projecting Health - a community health project in rural India. Our research objective was to identify the most effective means of promoting the distribution of health videos on a largely offline network of mobile phones in a resource-constrained environment. We compared three different distribution channels: mobile shop owners, laptop owners, and community health workers in a fourteen-week intervention that relied on data collected via missed calls from viewers and callbacks made to them. We present the design of our experiment, describe the challenges in deploying this experiment, and discuss overall findings. All three distribution channels were successful in targeting the community; mobile shops had access to most community members but the community health workers were most successful in getting videos out to those who were most interested in viewing them. Many participants were motivated to distribute the videos for the benefit of community. However, the number of missed calls received decreased over time, suggesting the exploration of alternative mechanisms to extrinsically motivate intermediaries and viewers for broader video distribution.

Online learning environments are being deployed globally to offer learning opportunities to diverse student communities. We propose the deployment of such an environment in low-resource after-school settings across India. We draw on preliminary research conducted in summer 2015 that leveraged existing ties with an NGO working across 35 after-school classrooms. Our larger goal is to (1) support tutors in curating and distributing learning content to students, (2) engage students in a mobile, networked learning environment where they can share and collaborate, and (3) evaluate the feasibility of online learning environments for low-resource contexts. In this submission, our focus is on the first component.

We present our findings from a mixed methods study of mobile phone practices of rural Indian women. We situate our study in the context of Projecting Health, a public health initiative we deployed in Uttar Pradesh (India) to target the dissemination of health information for mothers and newborns. Adopting the lens of feminist reflexivity, we reconsider our design of Projecting Health by factoring in the mobile media consumption and sharing practices of our target audience. We stress the importance of taking a community-oriented approach and show that although there are strict social conventions and patriarchal norms that constrain various practices of these women, they are able to exercise agency and mobilize help within their communities when needed.

Global development organizations rely on the essential affordances provided by both paper and digital materials to navigate hurdles posed by poor infrastructure, low connectivity, linguistic differences, and other socioeconomic constraints that render communication and collaboration challenging. This paper examines the collaborative practices around paper-digital workflows within global development organizations operating in low-resource environments. We use a mixed methods approach to gather data from 23 organizations in 16 countries. Our findings show the tensions that arise between the ubiquitousness of paper and the desirability of digitized data, and highlight the challenges associated with transitioning information several times between paper and digital materials. We also reveal design opportunities for new tools to bridge the gap between paper-based and digital information in low-resource settings. Finally, we contribute a nuanced understanding of the cross-cultural and infrastructural challenges that influence the paper-digital lifecycle. Our findings will be useful for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding or participating in the workflows that drive global development.

We present a qualitative study of Projecting Health, a public health project we deployed in rural Uttar Pradesh (India) to address persistently high maternal and infant mortality rates. This project is based on our model of Community-led Video Education (CVE), which leverages community resources for the generation, dissemination, and assimilation of visual media. We use the lens of information flows to examine how our instantiation of CVE enables the translation of globally approved health care norms to local household practices. We also demonstrate how CVE allows for integration with current community practices, existing state-supported health care infrastructure, social and patriarchal structures, and power dynamics within our target populations to drive community participation.

Building on recent HCI contributions that assert the materiality of digital information, we examine the material nature of digital media and information technology in the context of mobile music production, reproduction, and reception in rural and semi-urban India. We use ethnographic methods to study the recent adoption and use of mobile technology and discuss our findings in relation to the evolving materiality of music. We also investigate the sociotechnical configurations that emerge as a consequence of this materiality. Thus we contribute to HCI research by showing how the material representations of digital media affect the interactions of humans with technology.

Building on a growing body of human-computer interaction (HCI) literature on information and communication technology (ICT) use in the developing world, this paper describes the vast, growing mobile media consumption culture in India, which relies on the ubiquity of informal socioeconomic practices for reproducing, sharing, and distributing pirated digital media. Using an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) based approach, we show how piracy not only fuels media consumption, but also drives further technology adoption and promotes digital literacy. To do this, we first uncover the role of piracy as a legitimate actor that brings ICT capability to underserved communities and reveal the heterogeneous character of the pirated mobile media distribution and consumption infrastructure in India. We then emphasize the benefits of an ANT-based theory-driven analysis to HCI's efforts in this arena. In particular, ANT enables us to one, draw attention to the ties in the pirate media network that facilitate the increased decentralization of piracy in India; two, highlight the progressive transition from the outsourcing to the self-sourcing of users' media needs as this network evolves; and three, recognize the agency of human and non-human entities in this inherently sociotechnical ecosystem.

Folk music forms in India are rich and diverse, varying from region to region across the Indian landscape. The recent explosion of new media technologies (e.g. DVDs, CDs, mobile phones) in both rural and urban India is changing how oral folk music is being performed, produced, distributed, and shared. To further understand this impact, we conducted an extended field study across four field sites in India that are rich in folk music tradition and activity. Through a process of interviews, participant observation, focus group discussion, and content analysis with a varied group of stakeholders - including folk musicians, listeners, retailers, and radio show producers - we found that 1) there are a diverse set of motivations for performing and listening to folk music, 2) new media technologies are helping folk musicians become more popular, while reducing some streams of revenue, particularly for businesses engaged only in music production and distribution, and 3) as expected, piracy is widely tolerated by musicians, both out of apathy, and an interest in reaching new audiences with their message, while increasing their own fame and associated patronage. Based on these findings, we propose some implications for the design of an appropriate folk music sharing and distribution service that addresses these various motivations of the musicians and listeners.

In recent years, several high-throughput low-delay scheduling algorithms have been designed for input-queued (IQ) switches. It has been shown however that scheduling policies such as maximum weight matching, that perform optimally for an isolated switch, fail to provide stability in a network of IQ switches (M. Andrews and L. Zhang, 2001). Although there exist algorithms that ensure stability in networks of switches (M. Andrews and L. Zhang, 2001) (M. Ajmone Marsan et al., 2003), they are either not fully local or require knowledge/estimation of rates, and are thus not desirable. Here we propose a local and online switch-scheduling algorithm and prove that it achieves stability in a network of single-server switches when arriving traffic is admissible and obeys the strong law of large numbers. We then propose its counterpart for networks of crossbar switches and conjecture that this too is stable. Additionally, we prove that our algorithms provide a max-min fair rate allocation for isolated switches even when arriving traffic is inadmissible. We believe that fairness is key to ensuring stability in networks.

In recent years, several high-throughput low-delay scheduling algorithms have been designed for input-queued (IQ) switches, assuming admissible traffic. In this paper, we focus on queueing systems that violate admissibility criteria. We show that in a single-server system with multiple queues, the longest queue first (LQF) policy disallows a fair allocation of service rates. We also describe the duality shared by LQF's rate allocation and a fair rate allocation. In general, we demonstrate that the rate allocation performed by the maximum weight matching (MWM) scheduling algorithm in overloaded IQ switches is unfair. We attribute this to the lack of coordination between admission control and scheduling, and propose fair scheduling algorithms that minimize delay for nonoverloaded queues.